About MoneyWeek
MoneyWeek, a weekly investment magazine, covers financial and economic news and provides commentary and financial analysis across UK and other global markets. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of US-based Agora Inc. In addition to providing financial news, it also provides related stories focusing on economic or political news. Market commentary, analysis of financial market, share tips, interviews, regular columnists and lifestyle related articles are also published in the magazine.
MoneyWeek’s Business Objectives
MoneyWeek’s key business objective was to generate subscriptions and emails’ leads. In order to achieve this, MoneyWeek approached Jellyfish, a marketing agency specializing in digital marketing. Jellyfish designed a campaign site for MoneyWeek. It aimed at generating leads by driving Pay Per Click traffic to this campaign site, which was built exclusively for running MoneyWeek’s campaign. After the development of this site, Jellyfish succeeded to generate subscriptions for a fixed CPA, which was running since 2008. It aimed at generating a fixed number of trial subscriptions per month. In addition to this, it was also important to ensure good retention rate so as to not lose its existing traffic. This could only be achieved by ensuring high quality traffic.
Approach / Strategy adopted by MoneyWeek
Firstly, it was decided that Jellyfish shall design and build MoneyWeek’s campaign site which shall include articles, category and free report pages containing relevant content. This was required in order to provide an opportunity to drive high volumes of qualified traffic to the targeted landing pages. They had to ensure that they are able to achieve high volume of conversions on a monthly basis. Also, it was important to push new acquisitions during seasonal peaks to get the desired result in terms of high traffic. Jellyfish also conducted regular monitoring and tracking of the campaign results in order to optimize them. Techniques like Pay Per Click and on-site testing were conducted to do so. In addition to the above, several innovative methods were adopted to bring the brand identity online and pushing news acquisitions to a higher value.
Results achieved by MoneyWeek
This innovative approach adopted by MoneyWeek was largely successful and helped them to achieve sky rocketing results. Despite facing market difficulties, Jellyfish continued to generate subscriptions for a fixed CPA – which remained consistent since 2008. Before the PPC campaign, a total of 44,000 trial subscriptions were generated through Jellyfish campaign site since its launch. Brand keywords generated less than 13% of the conversions. Google Display Network could generate 27% of the trials in 2 years. After the PPC campaign was launched, there was a drastic improvement in the number of trial subscriptions achieved. A 92% increase was seen in 2011 in the number of trail subscriptions. Jellyfish expected to continue this growth by exploring new digital channels and alternate modes of acquisition. Eventually, Jellyfish was able to achieve a target of 50,000 paid subscribers through its continued efforts.
In addition to the PPC campaign, Jellyfish adopted various other methods to gain subscriptions. It offered direct subscriptions on a Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) model. Here, as the name suggests, the cost gets applicable only when a subscriber is acquired, which means that the advertising cost gets applicable only when the revenue gets accounted. So there is no loss. However, this mode of advertising is more expensive than the CPC model. Jellyfish also had put in a dedicated team consisting of experts to manage MoneyWeek’s account. This team conducted extensive study and analysis to build well organised and well researched keywords and ad groups.
MoneyWeek has been extremely satisfied with the results produced by the Jellyfish PPC campaign. Through their continued efforts and innovative ways adopted to achieve subscriptions, MoneyWeek could double its circulation and was successful in achieving the status of Britain’s largest financial magazine.
Learning
It is observed that MoneyWeek approached Jellyfish for its services when it felt the need to have a dedicated team to achieve its targets and objectives. It would have been a very ambitious decision to have taken it up all in-house and made an investment for the same. By seeking the services from an advertising agency like Jellyfish, MoneyWeek made a wise decision and reduced its risk significantly.
Jellyfish did not rely on only one method to achieve its target. It adopted the PPC campaign to generate more leads. This was backed with a MoneyWeek campaign site loaded with quality content including articles and free report pages. Having quality content on the campaign site ensured increase in volume of the traffic on the landing page and also improved the quality of traffic. When the quality of traffic improved in this manner, which meant genuine visitors were visiting the website, there were more subscriptions seen. In addition to getting indirect conversions through PPC, Jellyfish also used Cost Per Acquisition mode to get direct traffic. This mode was more expensive than the CPC mode, however, since it was acceptable to MoneyWeek, it could be used to get good results.
In addition to getting new acquisitions, it was also important to ensure that proper steps were taken to retain the existing subscribers. This was possible by ensuring that the acquisitions were made through high quality traffic comprising of genuine subscribers. Hence, such subscribers were more likely to continue with the service as compared to those who lack genuine interest.
It was also crucial to monitor and conduct regular checks to ensure the relevance of the keywords with regards to the product and the same needed to be updated on a regular basis to ensure success of the marketing campaigns. This was done by the dedicated team of experts whose job was to explore new keyword opportunities and come up with other innovative methods to keep the online brand recall high and push for higher number of acquisitions.
This case study is a good example of implementing different approaches for a single objective. Businesses cannot rely on one single strategy. They need to try out different approaches as here Moneyweek has done by using PPC, CPA, Quality and free contents on their page etc. A mix of different approaches helped Moneyweek to attain their objective.